Pretty Scars

by CD Reiss

  “It’ll be a phone call.”

  “When?”

  “As soon as he picks up.”

  “And then?”

  “I’ll tell him it’s over.”

  “And then?” His kisses were warm on my neck.

  “Then I’ll call you.”

  On Fifth, a police car pulled up behind his limo.

  “I’ll wait, Carrie.” He loosened his arms. “I’ll wait as long as I have to.”

  “You should go,” I said, pointing at his car.

  “You okay to get back?”

  “Yes, please go before I threaten to gouge out someone else’s eye.”

  He smiled, turned, and jogged down the steps. His driver opened the door, and with one last wave and a smile that turned a cold day into spring break, Gabriel disappeared behind tinted glass.

  When I got back to Margie’s, I took another shower to warm up, smiling as I remembered Gabriel’s kiss. I could be kissed like that for the rest of my life and never get bored. Never be afraid. All I had to do was call Peter until he picked up.

  Which turned out to be unnecessary.

  When I padded out of the shower in my robe, he was there.

  Peter.

  Sitting on a chair in a three-piece suit, an ankle over a knee, resting his arms on the chair with his Rolex glinting in the morning light.

  I sucked in a breath as if I’d been drowning.

  “Sorry,” he said without a drop of regret. “There’s a key that says ‘Margie’ in the junk drawer, so I figured I’d give it a shot.”

  Telling him to get the hell out would only make him mad. I had things to say and he needed to be calm to hear them, so I modeled what I wanted from him. “It’s okay.”

  He stood and buttoned his jacket. “No, Carrie. It’s not okay.”

  I stepped back, knocking into a side table so hard, a vase fell over.

  “How did Margie’s surgery go?” Peter asked. “Don’t answer. There was no surgery.”

  “Back up,” I said, holding out my hand.

  “Carrie”—he stopped his advance without stepping back—“we need to talk, don’t you think?”

  “We do.” I tightened the knot on my robe. It was the only thing between him and my naked, defenseless body.

  “So. Talk.” He put up his palm as if yielding the floor to me, but he was a few feet too close. I slid sideways to get away. He turned to follow my direction but didn’t come closer.

  “I don’t think we’re working,” I said. “Us. As a marriage.”

  “Because one of us is lying.”

  He was trying to trap me into a conversation about my lies because they were fresh, but his were baked deep, rotting our lives from the inside.

  “You knew, didn’t you?” I said. “When I woke up in that hospital, you were already there.”

  “Your father told me you were in trouble. I was there for you. I’ll always be there for you.”

  “He told me Gabriel had died. He didn’t die. And you knew.” Holding back another round of tears, I pointed an accusing finger. “You knew the entire time.”

  “He couldn’t take care of you.”

  “I don’t need anyone to take care of me.”

  “You did.” He came closer, his voice softening with the memory of those months when he took care of me. “You did and you do. You’re a beautiful woman, but what does that add up to in this world? Just a sad, beautiful girl with a sad, broken heart. And he wasn’t worth it. Do you want to know how much it cost to get him to walk away from you? To turn his back on your forever? It was a pittance really. There’s more in our couch cushions.”

  “That was my decision to make.”

  He smirked and stepped away, shrugging off his jacket. “He didn’t love you.” He threw his jacket on the couch. “He wanted your money.”

  “You don’t know anything.”

  “Maybe a little revenge for his father.” He unbuttoned his cuffs.

  “He loved me. You turned me into a trophy.”

  “I’m the only one who loves you.” He rolled up his cuffs to the elbow. “Who else would spend three months taking you all over Europe to get you over a dead man? Who else could support you when you gave up grad school? When you decided—yes, you decided—to be nothing but a trophy. I gave you that. I gave you what you wanted in life.” He yanked on his belt to release the notch, then pulled it through the loops. “He took the money, baby. No one’s going to buy me off.” Snapping the belt free, he wound it in one hand. “I own you, and you’re not for sale.”

  “No, Peter,” I said, my palm facing the belt. “No.”

  The muscles around his eyes twitched—not in anger, but as a way of receiving my denial and reconsidering his strategy. The buckle clinked when he tossed it away.

  “What, then?” He stepped close to me. “What?”

  “I want a divorce.”

  He should have been hurt, but he wasn’t. He was suspicious. Curious. Estimating my intent.

  “I don’t love you,” I said, knowing it didn’t matter to him one way or another. He wasn’t there to be loved. He existed to be admired and feared.

  “Carrie.”

  I backed up when he came to me, but the wall kept me from getting away.

  He reached for the belt of my robe and, with one finger, released it. It opened, allowing a chill past the fabric.

  The motion and result were so close to what Gabriel had done in Venice, and his intent was so different that a deep sense of wrongness cut through me.

  Peter was stealing my memory and twisting it into something ugly. That night in the Venice pensione was mine. It wasn’t his to corrupt and fuck him for trying.

  My hands shot out, pushing his chest. “Don’t you—”

  He didn’t let me finish. He was faster and stronger, grabbing my jaw with one hand and squeezing so hard my bones cried out in pain. “You know what your problem is, wife?”

  I tried to wrestle away, but he only gripped harder.

  “Your problem,” he growled in my face, “is you’re too beautiful for your own good.”

  With his free hand, he yanked the robe over my shoulder. I fought him, bending away, but I wasn’t a fighter or I would have known he’d use my imbalance to get my feet from under me. It only took a moment for him to gain complete control of my body, restrict my arms in the sleeves of the robe, and leave the rest of me naked and bent over the back of the couch.

  “Stop!” I cried.

  “I’ll stop.” He pushed his hips against my bare bottom, his cock hard through his trousers. “When you get it through your head that you don’t lie to me.”

  With one hand, he twisted the robe so the sleeves held my arms tightly behind me. With the other, he jammed the flat edge of his hand between my ass cheeks.

  “Please,” I whimpered.

  He curved his body against mine and spoke in my ear. “Another man might think you’re beautiful when you’re all dolled up. They have an undeveloped aesthetic. Not me.” He removed his hand to release his dick from his trousers. “When your mascara’s running down your face and your mouth is full of spit. When you’re crying in pain. That’s when you look like an angel.”

  The warm skin of his dick pressed against me, pushing me hard against the edge of the couch.

  “I won’t stay with you,” I said. “No matter what you do. It’s over.”

  “Wrong.” Without preamble or preparation, he put his thumb in my ass.

  I bit back a scream. “I won’t cry for your pleasure. Never again.”

  Pinning me with his hips, he pulled my head back by the hair, twisting my neck so he could see my face. “Let’s see about that.”

  He maneuvered his cock to my ass and had to bend close to keep me still. His cheek was so close to me I could smell his cologne and, under that, the stink of his humanity. He was just a man with soft parts and vulnerabilities.

  Maybe he’d kill me, but he was just a man.

  When he shifted to push against my anus, I
found the room to bring my face closer to his.

  Just a moment. No more. Decide. Now or never.

  I brought my open mouth toward him in a puckering, sucking, open-mouthed kiss to the cheek. In the split second I had once I could taste his sweat and feel the unshaven points of hair on my tongue, I clamped my jaw tight.

  He yanked away with a roar, but I held on, bolting upright with him, throat vibrating with a warrior cry of my own. He pulled my hair to get me away, but that only tore the skin in my teeth. His hands locked on my face, pushing me back with slippery palms.

  I tasted the thick metal of my husband’s blood as skin and tendon crunched between my teeth. He punched me in the stomach, and I opened my mouth to suck air, thrown back against the wall with the force of it.

  He was bent at the waist, hand over one side of his face, flaccid dick hanging out of his pants, blood soaking his white collar.

  Getting my legs under me, I wrestled my arms out of the robe.

  Slowly, still bowed, he looked at me with a terrifying calm.

  There wasn’t a single hard or sharp object in reach. He was between me and the exit, and a sidestep would put him between me and the bathroom door, which I’d have to close and lock. Knives all the way in the kitchen.

  Peter stood straight, letting his hand fall away from his wound. It flowed thick red.

  He wasn’t going to kill me.

  He was going to break me.

  Well, that was it for me. I’d spent every penny of my good fortune, shaken the dust out of the change purse, and counted all the money in the cushions.

  He came for me so quickly, I perceived it in slow motion. Putting my arms up did nothing. He wrestled me to the floor and put his hands around my throat.

  Tightening. Cutting off my air. Bruising me where people could see.

  That was when I knew it was all over.

  Part II

  Gabriel

  Chapter 28

  NOWHERE

  My first girlfriend was Creole. She had moved to Chicago from New Orleans. Babette. We met in our music elective. I was in ninth grade and she was a senior. She was a brilliant guitarist and her take-zero-shit attitude was a turn-on. Nothing was going to be easy with her. I liked the challenge as much as I liked her accent and the way her fingers flew across the strings. Getting her into bed was easier than I thought it would be, but after a few turns, I realized I was the one who had been easy. She knew what she wanted and demanded it, putting me in control. That role was easy, and I fell into it whenever we met in her empty house.

  The rest wasn’t. I’d been too immature to separate her submission in the bedroom from the take-zero-shit girl I fell for in class, and she wasn’t having any of it. Not for a minute. That ended in tears. Mine.

  But before she kicked me to the curb for trying to boss her around in the cafeteria, I met her family at a Mardi Gras party. They had a tradition. Everyone had a slice of King Cake. A little plastic baby had been baked inside it, and whoever got the slice with the baby had to prepare the next year’s feast or suffer a year of bad luck.

  Of course, I got the baby, and though Babette and I didn’t last long afterward—certainly not long enough for me to make the next Mardi Gras meal—I never forgot that inch-long plastic infant, face down, pushing out from the edge of the slice like a figure half-carved in marble. How it was encased so tightly in soft dough, coddled as if in a womb, yet suffocating in the unmoving mass.

  I’d plucked it out as if rescuing it to do CPR, leaving a grave-shaped hole in the cake.

  Maybe the consequence of not hosting the next party wasn’t a year of bad luck. Maybe I was doomed to travel far away and become that plastic baby. Half stuck, face down in a blackness specially shaped for me, but aware that ahead of me was light and freedom and movement. Behind me was a dark alley with men, and dull blades, and the smell of copper, and my life draining onto the stones. Behind me was a failure to protect what I loved.

  When I came out of the blackness, would I leave a trough? When the unconsciousness stopped pressing against my face, would it still exist inside me? Would I leave it in Venice? Or would it be broken into pieces and digested into nothing? I couldn’t imagine it didn’t always exist, unformed, unbaked, rising to meet me when a knife flashed and came down. Suffocating me, trapping me inside it with only my stifled questions to keep me company.

  Where is my little bird?

  Is she all right?

  Did they hurt her?

  And if they did, will I live to kill them?

  Chapter 29

  LOS ANGELES - 1993

  A full scholarship to USC took care of tuition, but food and shelter was another thing entirely. The assistant jobs had been given to other students, and the schedule at the Thornton School didn’t leave much room for even a part-time job off-campus. My mother gave me an allowance, but as usual, the money had run out. Again. Much of my father’s life insurance had been eaten up by legal fees against his firm, and my mother lived on minimum wage jobs and Prozac.

  She was bitter, and I couldn’t blame her. So even though I knew she’d send what she could, I didn’t ask for more money. After four years at USC, I knew how to survive. I went to the University Village mall, where Earl the security guard liked to hear me play.

  I needed to practice anyway.

  “Play that Stravinsky thing, would you?” I’d educated Earl in the ways of classical composers and he turned out to have a great ear. He always had a request.

  “You got it.”

  “Gonna miss your playing after you graduate,” he said as I set up my case.

  “I’ll miss the acoustics in here.”

  “Where you going?” he asked.

  “New York.” I drew the bow across the strings and made an adjustment.

  “Big Apple. You got a job there?”

  “Not yet. But that’s where the opportunities are.”

  He shook his head not as a negation, but with a rueful look back at youth.

  When I started playing the piece Earl liked, I wasn’t looking to fall in love. I wasn’t looking to get tied down.

  If I wanted sex, I could get it. There were enough women in my life who were as disinterested in emotional attachments as I was. They’d take their clothes off when I commanded it and writhe with pleasure when I allowed it. We wouldn’t ask for anything of each other outside the bedroom.

  If nothing else, I’d grown up enough to separate who I was sexually from who I was on the other side of the door. I hadn’t fallen in love since Babette, and that was fine. Making a name for myself as a musician would take up all my time.

  The acoustics in the front hall of University Village were outstanding. My eyes were closed as I played, listening for off tones and missed notes. I was in perfect flow. My fingers acted before my mind could correct, so my ears made adjustments. The conversations, the clattering food trays, the dim Muzak in the speakers were miles away.

  There was no reason for me to open my eyes, but I did, and that changed everything.

  She changed everything.

  Standing with her friend, red hair covering her face as she rooted around her bag, she looked up just as I saw her, as if my gaze had called out.

  USC is full of the children of actors, models, and athletes. My friend Danny said you couldn’t swing a dead cat without hitting something fuckable.

  But she wasn’t fuckable.

  Not exactly.

  She was more.

  Calling her beautiful illustrated the inadequacy of language. She was a melody. A perfect symphony. The final crescendo in a masterpiece written by a genius. Taking my eyes off her would be impossible. All the air in the room bent in her direction and emanated from her as if she owned it.

  And still, my fingers did their job, filling the room with music that had been written for her before she was born.

  She was impossible. Eternal. Divine.

  Nothing like her should exist anywhere but Olympus.

  With a little smile, she dr
opped a bill in my case and walked out with her friend, getting momentarily lost in the afternoon sun.

  I stopped playing to watch her go.

  “You got a day’s worth out of her,” Earl said from behind his podium.

  “Yeah,” I said, assuming he was talking about her looks.

  “You gonna get greedy and keep playing?”

  “Huh?”

  He pointed at my case with its dotting of loose change and a single, rolled up bill. I picked up the cash. Benjamin Franklin stared at me with a sly smile.

  That couldn’t be right. Even if it was, I couldn’t take it. Not from another student. Not from anyone who wasn’t Bill Gates.

  Looking out the glass doors, I saw her and her friend make their way to the crosswalk and wait for the light.

  “You okay?” Earl asked with a knowing smile. “Or did that pretty thing shake you?”

  “I’m shaken,” I said, grabbing the pen off his clipboard. I scrawled my number on the bill and handed back the pen. “Save my spot.”

  “Will do.”

  I dropped my violin in the case and snapped it shut, losing a spray of pennies and dimes, grabbed my bag and case, and ran after her.

  Behind me, Earl shouted, “Good luck!” right before the doors closed.

  I managed to not get run down crossing Jefferson, but I was going to lose her.

  “Hey!” I called, but she didn’t hear me, and we were in a world of heys and yos. I needed to be more specific. “Hey! Miss! Red Hair! Beautiful!”

  Her friend, who had the quirky pixie girl thing down to an exact science, turned around. “Hello again, Mr. Stravinsky!”

  I stepped it up and got to them, out of breath.

  “Are you all right?” Hundred-Dollar Girl asked. A glossy blue headband held her long, candy-red hair behind her ears, but the breeze blew it across her face anyway, sticking a single strand her pale lip gloss.

  To be that thread of hair clinging to those lips.